[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 50: Sutapa

Sutapa opened the door before I could ring the bell. She must have been watching from the window.

She was wearing an old cotton nightie with a cardigan over it and her hair was down, and she looked at me standing on her doorstep at eleven at night in my sweat-stained training clothes with gravel dust on my knees, and her face did something complicated.

"You're hurt," she said.

"I'm not. I think I scbangd my knee."

"Come inside."

It was the same house. The same hall where the Holi party had been. The same couch, though they had re-covered it, dark green now instead of cream. The same staircase going up to the bedroom where Sutapa had shouted down to the crowd, Rahul, your bed is ready. I had not been inside since that night. I stood in the doorway and looked at that staircase and felt my breath catch.

Sutapa saw where I was looking.

"I know," she said quietly. "I almost moved. After. I asked Dilip if we could sell it. He said I was being dramatic." She took my hand. "Come into the kitchen. Not here."

She made me sit on a stool in the kitchen while she cleaned the scbang on my knee with Dettol and cotton wool, kneeling on the floor in front of me with her hair falling forward over her face. It stung. I did not say anything. Her hands were very gentle.

"Rashmi said he swung at you," she said, not looking up.

"He was drunk."

"She said you put him on the ground in one second and the gym girl said you could have broken his arm."

"I could have."

She looked up at me then. Her eyes were very dark in the kitchen light.

"Why didn't you?"

It was the second time that night someone had asked me that. I gave her the same answer I had given Kimi, and she nodded slowly, the way Kimi had.

Then she put the cotton wool down on the floor, and put both her hands on my knees, and leaned forward and rested her forehead against my thigh, and stayed there.

"I'm so tired of being afraid of him," she said into my leg. "Eighteen months. Every time my phone rang. Every party. Every time Dilip went on tour and Rahul knew he was gone." Her voice was muffled. "Tonight Rashmi called me and said the security officer took him away in a Gypsy, and I sat down on the kitchen floor and laughed until I cried."

I put my hand on her hair. It was soft and smelled of coconut oil.

"Sutapa," I said. "He said something to me tonight. Before he swung."

She went very still against my leg.

"He told me to ask Poroma what she promised him on Valentine's night. How many minutes she said she'd fight him for. Who she was performing for."

For a long time Sutapa did not move. Then she lifted her head and sat back on her heels on the kitchen floor and looked up at me. Her face had gone pale.

"You already know," she said. "Don't you. You've worked it out."

"I want to hear it from someone who was there."

She closed her eyes.

"He told me," she said. "Not before. Afterwards. About a month after Holi. We were in bed at his flat and he was in one of his moods, boasting. He liked to boast to me about her, because he knew it hurt me." She swallowed. "He said, You thought I won her at your party? She was mine five weeks before your party. She came to that party already mine. She told me exactly how long she'd hold out. Nine minutes, she said. She came in at nine minutes and twenty seconds. She's very punctual, Ranjeet's wife."

The kitchen tap was dripping. I counted the drops. One. Two. Three.

"I didn't know whether to believe him," Sutapa whispered. "He lied about everything. I told myself he was lying. But I'd been holding the stopwatch, Ranjeet. I'd watched her face. And at the end, when she screamed it, she looked straight at you. Not at him. At you. I thought it was because she was ashamed." Her voice cracked. "I think now she was checking whether you'd believed it."

I do not know how long I sat on that stool. Sutapa did not move from the floor. She did not try to touch me. She just stayed there, kneeling, while I sat in her kitchen and felt the last nine months rearrange themselves around me like furniture in an earthquake.

Every time I had forgiven her. Every single time. The first night back from Mandarmoni, standing in the hall: You fought. You're correct there. You fought. In our bed, when she rode me and edged me and asked me questions I could not answer. I had told myself that night that she was a good woman who had been tricked, that what I had watched at the party was a defeat, that defeats can be forgiven.

It had not been a defeat. It had been a performance. And I had been the audience it was written for.

"I'm sorry," Sutapa whispered from the floor. "I'm so sorry, Ranjeet. I should have told you months ago."

I looked down at her. Her face was wet. She was holding the edge of my training shorts in one fist, the way Nupur held my shirt when she was frightened in a crowd.

"You're telling me now," I said.

Something in her face broke open.

I do not remember deciding to kiss her. I remember reaching down and taking her face in my hands and lifting her up off the kitchen floor, and her coming up onto her knees between my legs, and then her mouth was under mine and it was salty from crying and she made a sound against my lips, a small helpless sound, and her arms went around my neck.

It was not like the first time, in my flat, gentle and careful. Nothing about it was careful. She kissed me as if she was trying to climb inside me. I stood up off the stool and pulled her up with me and lifted her and set her on the edge of the kitchen counter, scattering a steel tiffin box and a packet of Marie biscuits onto the floor. Neither of us looked.

"Not here," she gasped against my mouth. "Not in this house. Not upstairs."

"Then where?"

"Here," she said. "Here. Right here. Just not up there."

I pushed the cardigan off her shoulders. Under the old cotton nightie she was naked, and I could feel the heat of her through the thin fabric, her nipples hard against my chest. She pulled the nightie up over her head herself and dropped it on the floor among the biscuits. She sat there on her own kitchen counter in the yellow light, completely bare, breathing hard, her thighs open on either side of my hips, and looked at me without any shame at all.

She was full and soft and warm-skinned, heavy breasts with dark wide areolas, a soft round belly with a fine line of hair running down from her navel to the thick dark bush between her legs. A woman's body. Not arranged for anyone. I put my hands on her waist and felt her shiver.

"Look at me," she said. "Not at the stairs. Look at me."

I looked at her.

She pulled my T-shirt off and ran her hands down my chest, over the muscle the gym had put there over seven months, and I watched her eyes widen slightly. She hooked her fingers into the waistband of my training shorts and pushed them down, and I was so hard it hurt. She wrapped her hand around me and stroked me once, slowly, looking into my face.

"You're shaking," she said.

"So are you."

She laughed, a short wet laugh, and pulled me closer by my cock, and I bent my head and took her nipple in my mouth.

She arched back against the kitchen cabinets with a cry. I sucked hard, the way she had shown me she liked the first time, and rolled the other nipple between my fingers, and felt her hips start to move on the counter, grinding against nothing. Her hand on my cock had stopped stroking. She was just holding on.

I slid my hand down over the soft curve of her belly into the hair between her legs and found her soaking. She was so wet my fingers slid into her without any resistance at all, two of them, deep. She grabbed my shoulder and bit down on it to keep from crying out.

"Ranjeet," she said into my skin. "Ranjeet, please. I don't want to wait. Please."

I pulled my fingers out and she whimpered at the loss. I took my cock in my hand and rubbed the head up and down between her lips, slow, once, twice, the way Poroma had taught me to tease. Sutapa grabbed my hips with both hands and pulled me into her, hard.

We both made a sound. She was hot and tight and gripping, and I was in her all the way in one stroke, and she wrapped her legs round the backs of my thighs and locked her ankles and held me there.

"Don't move," she whispered. "Just. Wait. Let me feel it."

I stood there inside her, holding her waist, with my forehead pressed against hers. Her breath shuddered against my mouth. I could feel her pulse around me, tiny clenches, as if her body were testing whether I was real.

Then she started to move. Small rolling movements of her hips on the edge of the counter, grinding me deeper. I started to move with her. Slow at first, long deep strokes, pulling almost all the way out and then sinking back in. Then not slow. The counter was the wrong height and I had to bend my knees, and the cabinet doors behind her rattled on their hinges with every thrust. A steel glass fell into the sink with a clang. Neither of us cared.

"Harder," she gasped. "You can. I want you to. Harder."

I took her hips in both hands and pulled her onto me as I thrust, and she threw her head back against the cabinet and cried out. Her heavy breasts bounced against my chest. Her nails dug into my back. She was wetter than I had ever felt a woman be. I could hear it, the slick sound of me going into her, over the rattle of the cabinets and her ragged breathing and my own.

"I'm close," she said, staring into my face. "I'm close, I'm close, don't stop, don't you dare stop—"

I did not stop. I reached down between us and found her clit with my thumb and rubbed it in the tight fast circles she had shown me in the Ballygunge flat, and she came apart. Her whole body locked. Her legs clamped round me like a vice. She made a long, high, broken sound that I felt as much as heard, and she pulsed around me so hard that I could barely move inside her. I held her through it, still thrusting slowly, until the clenching eased and she sagged forward against my chest, gasping.

"Don't come yet," she whispered against my neck. "Not yet. Please."

"Sutapa—"

"I want to taste you. Please."

She pushed me back gently, and I slipped out of her, and she slid down off the counter onto her knees on the kitchen floor in front of me, among the spilled Marie biscuits.

She took me in her mouth.

I braced one hand on the counter. She was slow and deep and deliberate, sliding her lips all the way down to the base, so far I felt the back of her throat, then all the way back to the tip, her tongue swirling. Her hands held my hips. She looked up at me the whole time with those dark wet eyes. I could taste her own taste on myself when she kissed the tip, and I could feel how close I was, the pressure building in my balls like a held breath.

"Sutapa, I'm going to—"

She held my hips tighter and took me all the way down and kept me there. I came with a groan that seemed to come up from the soles of my feet, pulsing into her mouth again and again. She swallowed and swallowed and did not let go until I was completely spent and starting to soften. Then she let me slip slowly from between her lips and kissed the tip, very gently, once, like a full stop.

Afterwards we sat on her kitchen floor, both naked, with our backs against the cabinets and our legs stretched out among the biscuits, and she rested her head on my shoulder. Neither of us spoke for a long time. Upstairs, the house was dark and silent.

"She's going to tell you herself," Sutapa said eventually. "Isn't she. That's why she went to your lawyer. That's why she filed the complaint."

"Fatima says she wants to see me. To tell me something about the video. Before anyone else does."

"Will you let her?"

I looked at my own bare feet, at the scbang on my knee, at the biscuit crumbs stuck to my calf.

"Rahul wanted to be the one to tell me," I said slowly. "Tonight. In the parking lot. He wanted to see my face when I found out. That was the whole point for him. That was what he wanted out of it."

"And Poroma?"

"Poroma went to Lalbazar and filed a security officer complaint against him, knowing that if she did, he would send me that video out of spite." I closed my eyes. "She knew he'd do it. And she did it anyway. So that I'd hear it from her and not him."

Sutapa lifted her head and looked at me.

"You still love her," she said. Not jealous. Just stating it.

I thought about that honestly, for a long time, sitting on the floor of the house where I had watched my marriage end.

"I don't know what I feel," I said. "I'm not sure there's a word for it yet. But I think I owe her the chance to tell me the truth to my face. Once. Because that's the only thing she's never given me."

Sutapa nodded. She kissed my shoulder, softly, where she had bitten it.

"Then go and hear it," she said. "And then come and have dinner with us on Sunday. Nupur wants to show me how she does the cobra's voice."